Cities and Signs

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For the uninitiated: Hi, I'm Joe Martin, longtime curator of Paperdrums.com and about thirty other, more extinct websites.  Welcome to Cities and Signs, a blog devoted to Whatever The Hell I Feel Like Talking About.  And, being that I moonlight as a "pop culture" writer (CMJ, Skyscraper, Punk Planet, Mass Appeal, Magnet), said category essentially includes untimely rants about books (I tend to wait 'til things come out in paperback and, beyond that, I'm constantly catching up on the lesser-known fiction of the twentieth century), movies (same deal, except with "DVD" in place of "paperback" and "films" instead of "fiction") and music.  That said, however, I plan on diverting wildly from all three whenever the mood strikes, mostly because I have no interest in having any sort of bullshit central focus (beyond off-the-cuff analysis) or forced topical straightjacketing here.  Cities and Signs won't be purposeless - it's not a diaryblog or anything - but, for the most part, it won't be all that purposeful, either.  Instead, it'll just be a nice little forum for my musings on, say, an Angela Carter book I just picked up or some freshly discovered band like the Art Bears... a way to wax compulsive about subjects that I'd like to write about but, for some reason, can't imagine throwing into any sort of magazine/periodical.  So that's that.

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On the topic of the Art Bears: Picture Faust's woozily operactic female vocals fronting a jazz-influenced prog rock group with lots of rhythmic change-ups and a future John Zorn sideman (Fred Frith) on guitar and you'll have the gist, though the actual band is a little less fascinating than all of that.  If none of the aforementioned reference points make any sense to you, there's a good chance you probably wouldn't like 'em, though I'm willing to register a guarded "thumbs up" for most Frith projects (Henry Cow, Zorn's Naked City, the Residents' Commercial Album) on the basis of the guy's singular, fusion-filled style.

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On the topic of Angela Carter: She's amazing.  I just picked up a used copy of Burning Your Boats - a collection of all her published stories (and then some) - and I'm already as enthralled as I've ever been while reading shorter stuff.  She has (or had, as she died of cancer in 1992) a smooth, almost hypnotic way of knitting her sentences together and tends to read like a more sinister Nabokov plumbing the history of literature in search of plots to respin and/or recycle.  As a result, her stories tend to read like a less expressionist/more British Donald Barthelme channeling his sarcastic cultural appropriation through 19th century horror tropes.  The style makes for some unique joys, to say the least, and curiosity-seekers are encouraged to check out "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" (also available in 1985's Saints and Strangers).  It's about as indelibly creepy as fiction gets and, as a result, happens to be one of her best (and most widely anthologized) stories.

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That's all for now.  Check in later this week for more rambling.